Immigration debate exposes white evangelicals' unholy alliance with Trump

And who is my neighbor?

Many years ago, when I was a much younger man, I recall taking a ride on a church bus down a long dirt road with a group of other young adults. We all attended the same local Southern Baptist church and were on our way to visit a camp of seasonal farm workers from south of the border.

We introduced ourselves to the teenagers and young adults living at the camp and then we played volleyball and had a cookout. I remember it being a good time. Before we left we invited them all to visit our church. Some of them did so, and we tried to make them feel welcome.

In light of pitched debate going on in our country over illegal immigration right now, you might be wondering if these immigrants were in the country legally or not. I can’t answer that question, because I have no idea what their legal status was. If you had asked me about it back then it would have struck me as an odd and irrelevant question.

We were trying to follow the Great Commission and share the love that Jesus had for all people as best we could. It didn’t matter how they got to our little corner of the world, they were part of our community and they were welcome at our church.

The story seems like something from another era, which of course it is. Immigrants who are in the country illegally have been cast (often with misleading or completely fabricated supporting data) as mostly an invading force of dangerous criminals by our current president, and a solid majority of white folks who identify as evangelical Christians enthusiastically support both his “zero tolerance” border policies and (it logically follows) his antagonistic narrative about the low character of the people those policies affect.

Before I get too far up on my high horse here, I should admit that the unholy alliance of white evangelicals and the Republican political machine was already in force back in the 80s and I loved Ronald Reagan almost as much as I loved Jesus back then. It was, as I said, a different era, and Reagan’s form of patriotic fervor was much more positive and less xenophobic and mean-spirited than Trump’s. Plenty of people were trying to sneak across the border back then too, but Reagan never used those people as political cannon fodder the way that Trump does.

But if we take a longer look back at history, fear-based appeals to racial animosity have long found a willing audience among white evangelicals. The Southern Baptist denomination in which I was raised came into existence because of its support for the institution of slavery. Later years saw white evangelicals defend segregation, sometimes violently so, and Christian pastors and deacons once served in prominent leadership roles with the Ku Klux Klan.

So it would be naïve for me to express shock that white evangelical support for Trump’s immigration policies hasn’t been negatively impacted by his prejudicial attitudes and behavior toward dark-skinned immigrants. When he refers to African nations as crap-hole countries (edited by me for decency) and Mexican and Central American immigrants as mostly hardened gang members who should be sent back across the border without due process, he’s just following the playbook that has worked for politicians looking to win votes from that demographic for at least the last 150 years.

As I’ve observed in previous columns, the passionate love affair between Trump and white evangelical Christians and their tacit acceptance of his starkly un-Christian attitudes and behavior has done incalculable, possibly fatal, damage to their ability to draw anyone who is not inside their political bubble to their faith.

That is, in my opinion, a real shame, because there is a message in the story of Jesus that is worth considering. Luckily that story is still available for anyone who cares to read it and judge for themselves what that message is.

This story was originally published June 28, 2018 at 2:17 PM.